Three Kind Words: Employee engagement for Philips

Recognized with an international EMEA SABRE Award in 2024 for best in the Healthcare – Medical Technology category.

Since 2019, Omnicom PR Group NL supports the Philips IGT (Image-guided therapy) communications team with employee engagement and internal communications. We were asked to build upon the existing ‘Three Kind Words’ program in the UKI market and help extend this campaign across the IGT global business in collaboration with Human Resources. The key guiding question was: How can we use the vehicle of well-being to help employees feel valued and excited in times of change and uncertainty?

2023 was a momentous year for Philips. As part of the strategic restructure announced in January, Philips set on a journey to simplify its operating model to make the company more agile and competitive again. During this period of uncertainty, there arose a necessity to safeguard the mental well-being of employees.

Research and insights demonstrates the powerful link between expressing gratitude and improving mental health in an authentic way. Those who are kind and compassionate, experience clear benefits to our well being and happiness. Kindness also helps reduce stress and improve our emotional well-being, as stated in the Mental Health Foundation’s Kindness matters guide. Following this simple but strong insight Three Kind Words was developped. A concept that is easily approachable and guarantees inclusiveness, initiating the sharing of recognition between Philips colleagues and thus contributes to feeling valued.

Another key source of insight for this campaign came from engaging with the HR managers, Site leads and Well-being ambassadors of 10 sites across the world: Alajuela (Costa Rica), Zaventem (BE), Minnesota (USA), Colorado Springs (USA), San Diego (USA), Reedsville (USA) Best (NL), Suzhou (China) and Bangalore and Pune (India). They shared they were keen to run the Three Kind Words campaign and despite cultural differences, this campaign resonated well globally. There were considerations required per site, which is why we followed a tailored approach where we established the best format, launch moment, and assets from the toolkit we created for the markets.

The objective was to engage Philips employees to send Three Kind Words to colleagues anonymously, either via the digital platform or in-person via the kindness wall set-up at various sites. And with that, demonstrate the power of kindness for improving the mental health of employees. To achieve this objective, we developped new assets and branding for the program, provided expert advice on program delivery and improvements, worked with key stakeholders and delivered a Three Kind Words toolkit. The toolkit included:

The reactions were overwhelming. In four months, we received a total of 4,091 submissions both virtually and via the physical Kindness Walls at the different sites. This adds up to more than 9,000 kind words. We also received positive feedback from employees, leadership and site leads. For example, the Global Head of People shared the following feedback:

Finally, we successfully collaborated with 10 different sites all over the world and the campaign realised the highest engagement level of any wellbeing program to date, with a budget of less than 20K. It is now being picked up beyond IGT, in other countries and business units and by the global Brand team.